Page:

Re: Why Trump? People are just sick and tired.

As I mentioned above, everyone is saying people want change - yet they voted in the same congress critters that have been in charge for a bloody long time (number sin my previous post above). How is that a vote for change?

A vote for change? And yet the people voted the republicans back into power in the house of representatives (just like 18 of the last 24 years including the last 6) and the senate (12 of the last 20 years including the last 2).

Does that really sound like votes for change? If people where voting for change I would have expected a glut of independent candidates being voted into congress. But there wasn't. There was absolutely no change, except to hand back power (and actually give more power) to the same people who have held power in congress for pretty much the whole time Obama was in power.

Re: OMG! You mean I won't be able to buy, umm, errr, wait a mo, it'll come back to me

I'm afraid your wrong there Tiger. Since ITAR everyone has gone to building offshore - Gulfstream dont build or design their jets in the US anymore, Bombardier is Canda, and Boeing source 90% of their parts from overseas. So the aviation industry outside of the US will be perfectly fine...

Re: Disturbing

Democracy isn't broken. But what Americans have is not democracy. It looks nothing like a true democracy. Look to places like Germany, Australia and New Zealand if you want to see effective democracy.

The problem is people see America as a democracy (no doubt the people of the Deomcratic People's Republic of Korea (I.e. North Korea) do as well, since it's in the name after all), and if you looked at that, then yes you would probably agree democracy is broken. But it isn't, you're looking at something completely different - I prefer to think of it as a Corprotocracy - Government for the Corporations, and the Corporations to control the Government...

Re: The room of people who will control Trump

Bill Hicks had it right YEARS ago:

"I have this feeling man, 'cause you know, it's just a handful of people who run everything, you know … that's true, it's provable. It's not … I'm not a fucking conspiracy nut, it's provable. A handful, a very small elite, run and own these corporations, which include the mainstream media. I have this feeling that whoever is elected president, like Clinton was, no matter what you promise on the campaign trail – blah, blah, blah – when you win, you go into this smoke-filled room with the twelve industrialist capitalist scum-fucks who got you in there. And you're in this smoky room, and this little film screen comes down … and a big guy with a cigar goes, "Roll the film." And it's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before … that looks suspiciously like it's from the grassy knoll. And then the screen goes up and the lights come up, and they go to the new president, "Any questions?" "Er, just what my agenda is." "First we bomb Baghdad." "You got it …"

Re: OMG! You mean I won't be able to buy, umm, errr, wait a mo, it'll come back to me

Re: What they voted for

@ Bombastic Bob - I'd believe you, if it wasn't for the fact that the "people" continued to vote for the exact same establishment as always by re-voting the senate and house of representatives into republican hands. The same republican hands that have held the house of representatives for 18 of the last 22 years (including the last 6 years) and 12 of the last 20 years of the senate (including the last 2 years).

Re: How can any decent voter

You're all whining about not the votes not being representative of the countries involves and mentioning the low voter turnout. Well if you want high turnout, easy, make it compulsory to vote. Australia does it ($50 fine if you don't vote), and the turnout is near to 99%. And yes if you don't want to vote for any of the candidates in Australia, you can do a donkey vote (i.e. deliberately invalidate your vote - scribble none of the above on the sheet, draw a picture of a donkey, or whatever you feel like), the number of donkey votes are counted and give a very good picture of the number of protest votes out there.

You don't here people complaining in Aus about the parliament not being representative of the actual country. If you want it representative, MAKE EVERYONE VOTE! Simple.

Political theatre only

I said it months ago this is all just political theatre. Ireland have to be seen to be fighting this, but they know they will lose and I doubt they will pull out all the stops to try and win. But if they don't appear to be fighting in Apples corner, then Apple might question using them for its EU base.

So they'll talk the talk, throw a few punches and then go down in the fifth round. And blame it all on the EU. The EU makes such a great political scapegoat after all...

Re: Go after the lawyers as well...

Actually it does. To set up any small business, the easiest way is to buy an "off the shelf" company, set up by a lawyer. The lawyer is supposed to do due diligence to ensure that the person buying it is on the level and not setting it up in order to perform illegal activities. Whilst it is possible to set up your own company, it is hugely more expensive and difficult (and I think still needs a lawyer involved at various stages). Since the bastards behind these things will almost certainly be going the easier way, the lawyer who doesn't do the due diligence should get it in the neck.

I've never been involved in liquidating a firm, but I can pretty much guarantee that would also need a lawyer involved. Rather heavily I imagine...

Re: The law is there for a reason, it’s to stop companies inundating people with unwanted messages

Just a suggestion - Anyone involved in liquidating a company with outstanding fines is forbidden from holding directorship of another company for 10 years? I would also suggest them being forbidden from holding a senior management position for 10 years but I doubt that's enforceable.

Go after the lawyers as well...

Might I also suggest that the lawyers involved in liquidating these companies and then setting up new ones should be disbarred for aiding and abetting a crime.

Trust me, do that a couple of times and this will stop VERY sharpish. Whilst it might seem like the first thing on any lawyers mind is to slurp up as much cash as possible in any situation, this is actually the second thing. The first is to make sure they wont get debarred for any action they do, basically so that the second thing on their mind (slurping up as much cash as possible) will be able to continue...

Re: How about "Hypermoon"

Re: Rotten Apples

Sorry but I have to call you out on comment a) - you can pick up a copy of Win 7 with ease in a lot of places. Hell I bought one not so long a go for a song on mmoga.com. So that bit is a bit of bollocks.

You can simply say, you dont like Windows and you dont think they have the programs you need. You can say that. I know this is the modern Internet where you feel like you need to be either a rabid fanboi for something or a rabid anti-fanboi against something, but really you can just state that something doesnt do what you want, so you dont like it. That is acceptable.

Weak decision from the Pirates

It's easier to sit back and complain, then to take the lead and fix a problem.

That's all the Pirates are doing, choosing to say sorry but we dont have solutions, and we dont want to take responsibility for fixing the problems, but we're happy to criticise when others propose solutions...

Re: Fear of flying

For you guys that are afraid of flying. I am an Aerospace Engineer, i design the bloody things for a living. And I continue to be happy to fly in the wonderful man made birds even after knowing the shit that can go on in this industry. Trust me, you can relax and enjoy your flight (unless your flying Air France in which case prepare to have an absolutely sh*t flight, but that has nothing to do with the aircraft!)

Back when I was at uni we had one annoying idiot that, any time there was a guest presenter, would ask a long and interminable question to try and win brownie points with the course director for participation. Right up unitl the point, where someone dived 5 rows down the steeply sloping lecture hall in order to whack them on the back of the head when they put there hand up at question time. Cue a loud cheer from the entire lecture hall and one very bemused looking presenter.

Sorry to be a doubter...

But having worked in lots of companies, spending your uni degree learning one company's system of working is unlikely to help that much when you get out into the real world (unless you stick around at that one company for the rest of your days). No more so than a current uni degree.

But thats not the main Problem. Britain doesnt need MORE Universities, it needs the current ones to be brought up to scratch, so that the students currently graduating actually have the skills that employers want. More Unis means the money gets spread around even thinner and the level of education across the board drops. That is not what anyone wants or needs...

Do anything to excess is stupid

There is nothing wrong with having the odd Red Bull or whatever. Just like there's no problem having the odd night out on the boozer, the odd time eating a tub of ice cream in a single sitting or anything else that is "bad" for you.

But when you make a habit of it, that's when it becomes a problem. Anyone who drinks 5 Red Bulls in a day is being daft. Anyone who drinks 5 Red Bulls a day for a week deserves whatever retaliation their body decides to give them!

Damn I love Science...

Your looking at the market wrong

The market for selling PC kit might be slowing down, but market usage of PC's is not. The fact of the matter is that anyone in the developed world who wants a computer has one. The market has reached saturation, and it has been at that point for a while. In the past, despite market saturation, people regularly upgraded because new programs required better hardware to run. However, that is not the case anymore. The latest AAA games can all be played on 3-5 year old Hardware (unless you absolutely needed every graphical setting on max). So the Need to upgrade is gone, and now the replacement cycle is much slower. The market is not going away it is merely recalibrating to the new reality where new Hardware does not offer the significant increases of previous generations.

Comparing this to Smartphone and tablets is not a like for like comparison of where the market stands now. Every new generation of tablet brings significant gains in usage, power and abilities. As such, the upgrade cycle is fast and it is selling well, eventually it too will hit the same saturation and Performance drop off curve but it hasnt yet.

Smartphone sales are dropping back (just look at Apple's recent sales show) and the reason is that they have now hit that saturation point, each new generation of smartphone doesnt really bring any huge benfits, the phone is only slightly faster, with slightly more memory, slightly less weight. And its safe to say everyone who wants a smart phone by now, has one already. The upgrade cycle is now getting longer, new phones are only purchased when old ones die rather then on the previous regular basis. This is just the new reality.

The current market realities were always going to occur, market saturation was inevitable, we should be congratulating the PC firms for getting a PC in almost every household, but they should never have expected to continue to sell us a new PC every year, if they werent able to maintain the massive Speed increases that fueled those yearly PC sales...

Maybe im being cynical here

but I read his comment like this:

That the government wont shift funds from the 26bn that it currently provides to institutions for UK only funded Projects to cover the gap from the 8bn in Science funding that comes from the EU. That's a fine sentiment, BUT he makes absolutely ZERO mention about where the money for that missing 8bn is going to come from. The 5bn that goes TO the EU for Science doesnt come out of that 25bn, so the defecit isnt 3bn, it is 8bn. As you have about a snowballs Chance in Hell that that the 5bn that goes to the Eu for science funding will go back into UK Science funding. Science isnt a vote winner, I guarantee that 5bn will go to the NHS, or be used to prop up other departments who find there funding cut, when they realise they wont be getting back anywhere near as much from Brexit as they thought....

Wait three dead members in the last few years...

... and they are offering deceased band members ashes as an incentive to sell new albums...

Hmmm...I would advise any aspiring metal musicians out there to think long and hard before accepting a position with Negativland anytime soon... At least until the promotion is well and truly dead and buried...

Re: Harold Holt

"So something designed to look for missing objects is to be based at a facility named after Harold Holt?"

Hey, you have to give the Aussies credit, they're still looking for Harold Holt obviously. Having given up on Russian submarines and dangerous sea currents, they've decided to look a little bit further afield...

Re: Bud Light is beer?

Enquiring minds and all that?

So were the cable positions not properly makred on council plans? Or was the Network rail check something along the lines of - "What are the chances of there being cables laid this close to the Train lines?"?

Farm tech...

"Your correspondent's knowledge of farming is sketchy at best, mostly being drawn from the ill-informed BBC Countryfile programme, but this seems like a solution to a problem that thousands of years of human evolution and progress has already solved."

In the UK I would say you are dead right, in Aus though, where some of the farms are as big as Wales, and use helicopters to do their cattle controls, I can imagine it would be majorly useful. Although I cant imagine how you could keep it cheap? Especially since those farms tend to have 10's of thousands of head of cattle. That's a hell of a lot of transmitters, and a heck of a lot of data moving over the satellite...

Re: Go Germany! I don't think so ha ha

Actually for the record I'm an Aussie. And having lived in 8 different nations across Asia, Europe and the Middle East (minimum of 6 months each), I can hands down say Germany is the best nation I've lived in (including Aus!), and the only one that does a damn thing to protect individual rights.

I also dont have any problem with refugees coming here. Since the German government weren't willing to intervene militarily in Syria, it's only right that they try to help the people affected by it.

Strongest economy in Europe, strong industry, great people with a great ethic. I'm happy as punch to be living here. Oh and your comment "spoken like a true German" - as a rule, German's dont brag about how great their country is, they're a particularly modest people. Unlike others I can think of...

Using an Iphone?

Re: So...

TitterYeNot - just a quick question - since they're now saying that we can only see 10% of the actual galaxies out there, can we make the assumption that it is probably something similar within galaxies (i.e lots of very low brightness stars, brown dwarfs, dust clouds, etc.). So would that account for the missing "dark" matter?

Re: I left in the 70's

OK that needs to be called out - WHAT country could you not trade with before? Name me one? If what you meant is you couldnt take advantage of dismissing environmental, health, safety or other EU rules in order to get cheaper products (but which were unhealthy, potentially dangerous, or environmentally unfriendly) then sure fine.

Re: The UK is not educating people in Tech...

"If you want to have UK employees apply, then it's not enough to train them, you have to provide some assurances there WILL be jobs for them in those sectors, with a better guarantee that those jobs will not be replaced overnight."

I would have agreed with you except that there doesnt seem to be any lack of media and sociology graduates out there. Since most of them end up stocking shelves or selling stuff in retail stores, it cannot be the assurances of jobs in their sector driving them into it...

No degree guarantees you a job, and if you have the attitude that just because you got a degree you deserve your dream job, then your going to be sadly disappointed, no matter where you are in the world...

I'm actually curious...

What happens if it is a tied decision? Does it wait until a 9th judge comes on board? Does the previous decision stand? Does the previous decision get annulled? Does the whole damn shebang go back to the start to rejoin the merry go round once again?

Sorry to be a downer, but its almost impossible to have a system like you describe.

A simple example would be brand licensing - Starbucks US sells its brand rights to Starbucks UK so that they can run stores in the UK with the Starbucks brand. How do you determine what's a reasonable valuation of an intangible asset? you might think its worth X, but they almost certainly see it worth Y. How do you argue that point with them?

For another example, lets take your example of coffee beans, if they charge themselves £5 per kg of coffee beans or £50, how are you going to say that they are overcharging? There is nothing to say that people absolutely must buy the cheapest item available on the shelf, otherwise we would all be driving Fiat Pandas. So they would simply say they are buying the Rolls Royce of Beans and hence the higher price. How do you prove that they are really just profit shifting? How do you Force them to buy the cheaper beans?

Unfortunately, whilst a system like that sounds great, its almost impossible to work in practice...

Education is generally cheaper than prosecution

If there was more of a focus on teaching kids two specific things - 1) The world doesn't begin and end with social media - insults can be ignored; and 2) if its not something you would be willing to say to someone's face, then you shouldn't be posting it online.

Teach kids those two things, and the level of unpleasantness on the internet might just reduce a fraction. Admittedly, it will take a while, as all of the turds currently infecting the internet will still be around and there doesn't seem to be a way to flush them off yet.

Even though this piece of CPS guidance is overly broad, poorly written, and my god, that part about civil servants getting more protection then regular people is insane, but really the general sentiment that its time to actual start prosecuting some of the more disgusting denizens of the net is not necessarily a bad thing.

Still prevention is better than a cure, so hopefully the next generation can get some education about how not to be a complete twat on the internet, and then maybe we can all enjoy the internet in the future without the trolls...

Re: Ok...

So how do we get Spotify punished for this? I.e we need some government department to come in and declare that they were responsible for what was served in their ads, and hit them with a mega fine.

That is the only way, that these firms will take responsibility for what they dish out. At the moment, anyone willing to flip them a few bucks can send out an ad, and obviously Spotify take no interest in whats in those ads. But then again neither does any other internet firm. The only way to fix that is to make them criminally and financially responsible for what gets dished out.

Re: scammer's paradise

El Reg has a touch of multiple personality disorder it seems

Just yesterday (or was it the day before?) there was an El Reg article about how amazing all of these new Google appliances were and how they were going to be super successful and could change all of our lives. Obviously by someone who had very much drunk the Koolaid.

Now today we have this article, saying pretty much the opposite.

It's good to get a variety of opinions, but sometimes arguing with yourself in public makes you look crazy...